I wish I had songs I could give away…. unfortunately I can’t churn them out like the Beatles factory did. Some of the songs they wrote for others were pretty craptastic.. but suprisingly many of these tunes became huge hits! Then there are the songs that maybe the Beatles shouldn’t have given away. I obviously love the Mccartney tracks more, but his are definitely the stronger songs.

Funny Beatles factoid; when Paul would play World Without Love, as he sang the lyric “please lock me away”, John would always be quick to respond “ok”. Classic John.

SUPER ADDED BONUS!
Paul wanted to give this song to Frank Sinatra but ol’ Blue eyes thought that the song was a joke and reportedly said “Is this guy trying to have me?”. Frank is pretty dumb cus this song could have been a Sinatra classic.

Hands down.. Harry Nilsson is on my top ten list as a direct musical influence. And as far as childhood movies go, Popeye (Robin Williams 1st film) leads the pack in greatness. So obviously I was more than pleased to learn that these two were connected together via some strange, sea-shanty cold fusion. I dug into teh internets to find out just how this came to be. Here’s what I unearthed:

“For Robert Altman’s 1980 film Popeye, he recruited Harry Nilsson to do the songs and Van Dyke Parks to do the film score. The songs were sung in the film by the characters, a la any musical, but the original demos of Harry singing them still exist.

Apparently Harry was not the clear cut choice to do the songs according to Altman, “Nobody wanted him at first except Robin Williams. Everyone said ‘You’ll get in trouble with him — he’ll get drunk; he won’t do it; he’s all washed up.’ As a matter of fact I said all of those things about Harry to Robin myself one day. Then I went home and thought about it and said to myself, ‘Jesus, that’s what some people are saying about me!’ So I called Harry Nilsson, because I had never met him in my life, and we got along terrifically.”

If you don’t know much about Harry Nilsson, just do yourself a favor and click here or here and I promise you will be dazzled. Plus you can laugh at how I shamelessly rip him off! There is a reason the Beatles said Nilsson was their favorite “group”.. and favorite solo artist :)